Teaching Indigenous Languages

Chapter 11, Teaching Indigenous
Languages edited by Jon Reyhner
(pp. 116-128). Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University. Copyright 1997
by Northern Arizona University. Editor's Note: This on-line version
lacks the Apache font used in the published version of this chapter, thus
some of the Apache words below are not spelled correctly.

Issues in Language
Textbook Development: The Case of Western Apache

Willem J. de Reuse

Two experimental language learning textbooks were developed in collaboration with Apache
speaking scholars from the San Carlos and White Mountain reservations. One was written in the
grammar-translation tradition and modeled after Wilson's
Conversational Navajo Workbook and Zepeda's
Papago Grammar. The other text was a guide to teaching Apache with the Total Physical Response (TPR) method, based on
Asher's (1982) teacher's guidebook. Both approaches raised a variety of problems that can be partially solved by
a judicious combination of the two approaches. For example, the classificatory handling verbs are best
taught by a grammar-translation method, supplemented by TPR style exercises; straightforward syntactic
structures (at least in Apache), such as negation, and yes-no questions, can be taught through TPR exercises
and supplemented by grammatical explanations. Additionally, native experts should monitor any text to
avoid culturally sensitive or politically inappropriate material. Finally, a dialogue between linguists and
native experts needs to be established in order to decide how much linguistic terminology can be handled in
each particular curriculum.

Let me start with a few general remarks about the development of
language textbooks as an effective
language renewal practice. We all know intuitively that books have never been efficient and sufficient aids towards
language renewal. However, Hebrew would never have been revived as a first language if it was not for generation
upon generation of Jewish scholars learning the language from books. Then again, Native American cultures (with
the exception of Maya culture) are not book cultures in the way Western culture is and therefore are justified in
being suspicious of books as possible instruments of Western Imperialism. But, Native American cultures, as cultures
have always done, have successfully adopted and integrated foreign cultural elements to their benefit. Examples would
be the pickup truck for more efficient transportation and, more recently, the computer as a possible educational
tool. Would it be wise to rely heavily on computer technology for language preservation? The point that I am trying
to make is that we can go back and forth arguing about whether textbooks are good tools for language renewal, and
we will probably never convince many people that they are useful. What I propose is that we start writing
textbooks, knowing full well that they will only be useful to some learners, and only part of the time.

There is no doubt, as has often been said at previous meetings of this
Symposium, that the best way
towards achieving successful language renewal is to convince parents (and grandparents) to speak the language and
nothing but the language to their children. No textbook, no school curriculum program is ever going to replace this.
However, if we are going to have second language curricula and second language textbooks, we should want to make them
as efficient and attractive as we can.

Three kinds of language textbooks

A few general remarks about the language teaching textbook situation
for Native American languages in
the United States are in order. It is useful to distinguish between three kinds of texts: there exist 1) textbooks that
teach Native speakers something about the grammar of the language, or teach them to read and write, but do not teach
the speaking and listening skills necessary for oral communication; 2) second language textbooks that teach the
language to speakers of other languages but avoid grammar to some extent; and 3) textbooks that try to do a little bit of
both, i.e., they teach the language, but at the same time try to be of interest to Native speakers or linguists by
teaching something about the grammar. It is my impression that in the United States, Type 1 textbooks are not very
common and often unpublished, while Type 2 and 3 textbooks are more common, Type 2 being more often published than
Type 3. Let me illustrate this situation with Navajo textbooks below. References with dates followed by asterisks
are unpublished; complete references are given at the end of this paper.

Within Type 2, one can further distinguish those texts that
provide very little grammatical discussion
(Wilson, 1969, Wilson & Dennison, 1978), to those who provide a fair amount of grammar, particularly Goossen
(1995), which approaches the amount provided in Type 3 texts. There are probably other Type 2 materials, such as for
L.D.S. (Mormon) missionaries, that I am unaware of.

The other Native languages of the United States do not have this profusion of materials, even though other
languages, such as Lakota, might outdo Navajo in terms of unpublished materials (see my bibliographies, de Reuse 1987, 1990).

In Arizona, there is something available for all the Uto-Aztecan
languages; Hopi has one Type 1 text
(Masayesva-Jeanne & Hale, 1976), three Type 3 textbooks, one published (Kalectaca & Langacker, 1978) and two
unpublished (Sekaquaptewa & Shaul, 1974-1977; Sekaquaptewa & Hill, 1995); Yaqui has one Type 2 text (Molina, 1995),
not counting the beautiful materials produced for young speakers in Sonora, Mexico. O'odham (Pima-Papago) has
one Type 1 text (Willenbrink, 1935) and one Type 3 text (Zepeda, 1983), and I suspect there are unpublished materials
for the Uto-Aztecan languages of Arizona that I am not aware of. I need more information about the Yuman languages
of Arizona.

Western Apache language textbooks

As first noted by Lewis (1989), the
prognosis for the survival of Western Apache is not good. Very few
parents speak the language to their preschool children. In San Carlos and Whiteriver, the largest towns on the San Carlos
and White Mountain Apache Reservations respectively, kindergarten playgrounds appear to be very much monolingual
in English. Even though it is politically incorrect to say so, the Western Apache language is endangered and drastic
steps will have to be taken to preserve and renew it. In her own presentation in this volume, Bernadette
Adley-SantaMaria, who is a native speaker and wrote a master's thesis on White Mountain Apache language shift, will provide
more detail about the present-day sociolinguistic situation among the White Mountain Apache.

Below are listed textbook materials for Western Apache, not including
my own recent work in collaboration
with Ms. Adley-SantaMaria.

Both of these are excellent for teaching speakers to read and write as well as something about the grammar, but
they would not be appropriate for non-speakers. Incidentally, it should be noted that Western Apache, like most other Native languages of the United States,
has quite a few short booklets or pamphlets that teach children or adults to read and write. These are not language
textbooks, and are not appropriate for non-speakers. A complete list of such materials is:

This last work teaches about seventy-seven words in the context of four simple sentence frames:

This is a _____.
Is this a _____?
No, this is a ______.
Yes, this is a ______.

Such contents might be appropriate for Head Start, but not for any other purposes.

Type 3 textbooks:
de Reuse (1994)*

This last work was developed for a University-level class for linguistics students, as well as Navajo and
Apache educators, and was used at the American Indian Language Development Institute in June 1994 at the University
of Arizona in Tucson. Speakers generally liked it, but it was a somewhat strange mix of very simple conversations
with very complex linguistic explanations. It could hardly be called a language teaching instrument.

To conclude, Western Apache might be the only major Native language of
the Southwest with no Type 2
textbooks at all for the adult level, and with no Type 3 textbooks for any level.

An introductory White Mountain Apache textbook

Ms. Adley-SantaMaria and I decided to remedy the situation described in
the previous paragraph by
collaborating on a Type 3 textbook for non-speakers of Western Apache. We decided on a Type 3 textbook for the
reasons below:

1. Could be used by non-speakers;
2. Designed for high school and university levels who can benefit
from some grammar instruction
(Odlin, 1994); and
3. Existence of several successful models of Type 3 textbooks; we
used Wilson's
Conversational Navajo Workbook (1995) and Zepeda's
Papago Grammar (1983) as models.

The result is our Ndee biyáti'
bígoch'il'aah (Learning Apache): An introductory textbook in the White
Mountain Apache language for non-speakers (de Reuse & Adley-SantaMaria, 1996). In addition to the body of thirty
lessons that have been completed, the final version will contain two introductions, one by myself and one by Ms.
Adley-SantaMaria, acknowledgments, a pronunciation and spelling section, a glossary, an index, and a paradigms
appendix. We used Wilson (1995) as a model for the first 20 Lessons. The lessons are written around grammatical topics
(such as locatives and possession) or around communicative topics (such as health and body part terms), and the
approach is basically in the grammar-translation tradition. Each lesson has a vocabulary list and extensive grammatical
explanation with illustrative sentences. The exercises are predominantly in the shape of sentences to be translated
into English. In order to make the work more communicatively relevant, the sentences to be translated are usually in
the form of question-response dyads. Our collaboration on this text raised a variety of ideological, practical, and
cultural issues.

Ideological issues

While the main purpose of our text is to teach elementary
conversational Western Apache with some emphasis
on reading and writing, I also wanted it to be used to teach some of the linguistics of Western Apache to Apache
students and speakers. In the next paragraphs, I explain the usefulness of linguistics to Apache speakers. Ms.
Adley-SantaMaria will also address some of these issues in her own presentation in this volume.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. To the
layperson, linguistics often seems boring because
it bears some resemblance to grammar. Everyone remembers English grammar from their elementary school or
high school years, and nobody liked it. The problem with traditional English grammar is that it did not seem to have
a point, or maybe the only point was that it told you what was "good" English and what was "bad" English,
without really explaining why. Linguistics tries to be a more responsible study of grammar, in three ways. First, it tries
to explain why things are the way they are, by trying to discover general rules but recognizing that sometimes
an explanation has not (yet) been found. Second, it tries to accurately describe the way people speak, without
unduly worrying whether a particular utterance is "correct" or "incorrect." Third, linguistics is not committed to a
particular language. Language is a universally human faculty, and linguistics is the study of what all languages have in
common and in which direction and to what extent they vary.

There are many educators who might be anxious to find out what they
will learn from the linguistics in this
text and how it will be useful for their students on the reservation. In my opinion, there are three basic ways in
which linguistics can be useful to Native American educators. First, most educators interested in the contents of this text
deal with bilingual situations, i.e. situations where both the Native language and English are used. In such situations,
one obviously becomes aware of the differences between languages. Part of linguistics is a subfield called
contrastive linguistics (sometimes erroneously called comparative linguistics, which should be reserved for the subfield
that compares languages in order to determine their common historical origin). Contrastive linguistics compares one
or more languages, emphasizing the differences in linguistic structure. It allows us to explain more accurately
why certain aspects of English, or of Western Apache, are hard to learn for speakers of other languages. The
practical applications to the educator are obvious. Our discussions of Western Apache grammar will in effect be
contrastive, since it will be assumed that English grammar is different from it in many ways. I do not know of any works on
the contrastive linguistics of Western Apache and English. Ms. Adley-SantaMaria and I had to work on what our
understanding of contrastive linguistics was. I would say that we had to explain a detail of Apache grammar really
well, because the facts are complicated, and Ms. Adley-SantaMaria would respond, "Why? It's not complicated to
me!" Indeed, what is simple and natural to a Native speaker of Apache is not necessarily simple to a Native speaker
of English, and vice-versa.

Second, as pointed out by Ken Hale in several papers (n.d., 1972,
1970-1975, 1976), Native American
languages form an ideal laboratory for teaching children about scientific inquiry. Native American languages have not
been codified in language academies or authoritative textbooks or dictionaries, which means that children do not
have preconceived ideas about what the "correct" language is. Like all speakers of a language, Native American
children (who speak their own language) do of course have an intuitive, largely unconscious knowledge of the rules of
the language. What the teacher can do is dialogue with the children in order to help them discover, little by little,
these unconscious rules. This process of discovery by dialogue is, as Hale convincingly points out, similar to the
teacher-student dialogue occurring in a physics or chemistry class and just as scientific. The only difference is that no
expensive supplies are needed, just a chalkboard and the children's native speaker intuitions. Thus, linguistics can be a
tool for teaching the principles of scientific inquiry. In order to use linguistics this way, educators themselves need
to know something about the linguistic structure of their languages. Ms. Adley-SantaMaria was not convinced of
this need, and I see her point, because it is precisely the children who are rapidly losing their native competence
and acquire, at best, a passive knowledge of Apache. A passive knowledge is certainly not as good as an active
knowledge for the purpose of discovering unconscious rules.

The third and final motivation for teaching linguistics is to get
Native American students interested in the
field. It has been pointed out several times (for example in Hale, 1972) that Native American Linguistics has been a
Euro-American type of venture. The Euro-American person comes to a reservation, identifies a "vanishing Indian
language" to be rescued from "oblivion," describes it, and gets substantial academic recognition for his or her
publications. The language is rescued from "oblivion," yes, but only in the form of scholarly books, to be found on
the shelves of museums and research libraries. During that time, the language might well suffer conditions of
oppression and become extinct among the people who spoke it. It is no surprise, then, that some reservation communities
are resentful of linguists, who come in, do their research, leave, and achieve recognition thanks to data provided
by members of the community but do not do anything that would benefit that
community. Therefore, the more Native Americans gain an understanding of what linguistics can do for their communities, the easier it will be for them
to prevent this type of exploitative situation and identify ways in which linguistics can benefit their communities.

Obviously, linguists should be careful of trying too hard to get Native
American students interested in
linguistics. There will never be as much money in linguistics as there is in law or medicine, and the study of linguistics,
like baseball or square-dancing, is definitely a matter of taste. Some love it; some don't. Nevertheless, I am convinced
that the field of Native American linguistics will progress substantially if only a few more Native American
students develop a taste for it. Educators should be ready to recognize such students when they spring up. Obviously, I
encourage Native speakers to become linguists, so that they could go on and develop materials on their own.

I realize that some people might feel there is something politically
incorrect about collaborating with a
native speaker, rather than let him/her do it by him/herself. Since Ms. Adley-SantaMaria's field is not linguistics, we had
to work together. Considering the endangerment of the language, I do not think it is a good idea to wait for an
Apache linguist to graduate before writing a textbook. Note also that the only other existing Apache textbook, which is
on Jicarilla Apache of New Mexico, was written with a similar sort of collaboration (Wilson & Vigil Martine, 1996).

Practical and cultural issues

On a more practical plane, Ms. Adley-SantaMaria and I had our
disagreements about explaining complex
morphology without presupposing a lot of linguistic knowledge on the part of the learner; we compromised and
will continue doing so. For example, I agreed on not attempting to explain the subject prefixes that must occur in the
verb. The morphological and morphophonological facts involved are just too complex. On the other hand, I would still
like to keep my discussion of the object prefixes that occur in transitive verbs. The grammar of the object prefixes is
still not simple, but they are easier to learn to recognize than the subject prefixes. I prefer this approach to that of
Wilson and Vigil Martine (1996) who do not discuss verb prefixes, except for three passing mentions on pages 35, 87,
and 104 and a discussion of distributive plural da(a)- on pages 76 and 108, which must leave the moderately
inquisitive learner rather curious.

Our collaboration was absolutely crucial in avoiding structures with culturally sensitive connotations, even
though some of these would have been useful for purposes of grammatical illustration. We decided to avoid anything
having to do with sex and bodily functions, drug and alcohol abuse, child and spousal abuse, witchcraft, and
traditional religious beliefs. Certain details of clan nomenclature were also avoided. Consider the example sentences below:

All these seem nice examples of the construction with the postposition P-aa and the verb of motion
nashaa/nadaa/naghaa. There are two usages to this construction: the object of a postposition P-aa can be a thing, as in the first
two sentences or the object of the postposition can be a human being. The usage exemplified in the last two sentences
is problematic in that some people might be made uncomfortable by the sexual connotations they attach to it, so we
are considering taking it out. However, we do want to retain the usage exemplified by the first two sentences above.

The last ten lessons of the text are conversations on everyday topics
with interlinear translations and
detailed lexical and grammatical notes inspired by (but not translated from) the section on conversations in Zepeda (1983,
pp. 43-154). The conversations in these lessons were originally composed for me by two Apache educators from
San Carlos, and then translated into the White Mountain dialect by Ms. Adley-SantaMaria and myself. In so doing we
had to make sure the place names were relevant and had to create Apache proper names that are realistic enough,
while avoiding references to a real individual.

Finally, it should be noted that I never attempted to create any Apache
sentences or conversations by myself
for the text, and I am happy I never tried to do that, since I would have been responsible for quite a few linguistic
and cultural blunders. I always used sentences given by Ms. Adley-SantaMaria or by other speakers I had worked
with earlier. If the sentences came from other speakers, Ms. Adley-SantaMaria would sometimes say, "You can't say it
this way!," which just shows how much dialectal and stylistic variation there exists within Western Apache.

A guide to teaching Apache with TPR

Another text I was instrumental in helping produce is Goode (1996),
which is not close to final shape. It is
a translation of most of the sentences given in Asher's (1982) teacher's guidebook and, when my own commentary
is integrated into it, will function as a fairly comprehensive guide to teaching Apache with the Total Physical
Response (TPR) method. The sentences were translated into the San Carlos variant of Western Apache by Philip Goode
and were also recorded on cassette tape. Some problems already identified are the following.

The TPR method relies heavily, especially in the beginning of a course,
on commands. English has a very
simple verb form to express commands: it is basically the verb stem. However, for commands, Apache uses an inflected
verb form, which has to be inflected for second person singular, dual, or plural. Therefore, the listener will have to
hear three different commands and interpret them correctly as singular, dual, or plural, whereas English will have the
same verb form, regardless of whether the command is given to one, two, or three or more people. An Apache example
is given below:

Hizii Stand up.
Holsii Stand up (to two people).
Daholsii Stand up (to three or more people).

The TPR method relies heavily on giving, putting down, and picking up objects, which in Apache are translated
by thirteen classificatory handling verbs (not counting verbs of throwing and dropping), a rich and subtle system
which would place an unreasonable burden on the beginning learner if it was exclusively taught through TPR.
With Witherspoon et al. (1986), I agree that using TPR with classificatory handling verbs is very useful for review
and reinforcement, but I would not advise teaching them through TPR only, as this would take almost thirteen times
as long as teaching the English equivalents.

Finally, TPR relies heavily on touching and pointing activities, which
are often culturally inappropriate for
Apaches. Thus, it would be unwise, to use commands such as those below, all translated from Asher (1982):

Notwithstanding these serious shortcomings, the TPR sentences
revealed quite a few interesting and useful
constructions which were not covered by the Ndee biyáti'
bígoch'il'aah text discussed earlier.

Conclusions and recommendations

We suggest that the problems posed by the two preliminary Apache texts
we discussed can be partially solved
by a judicious combination of the two approaches. For example, the classificatory handling verbs are best taught by
a grammar-translation method, supplemented by TPR style exercises. Straightforward syntactic structures (at least
in Apache), such as negation and yes-no questions, can be taught through TPR exercises and supplemented by
grammatical explanations.

Native experts should monitor any text to avoid culturally sensitive or
politically inappropriate material.
Finally, a dialogue between linguists and native experts needs to be established, in order to decide how much
linguistic terminology can be handled in each particular curriculum.

One criticism I anticipate of this paper is that I am not aware of all
the unpublished materials that have
been developed, and such unpublished materials might have thought of everything mentioned above. This might well
be true and brings us to an important recurring problem. Many educators and textbook developers, notwithstanding
a symposium such as this one, still work in too much isolation and are shy of sharing their materials with others,
partly for fear that they will be criticized and partly for fear that they will be plagiarized or used for the wrong purposes.
But in these times of urgent need for language renewal, the need to share
should be more important than fear of criticism, and U.S. copyright laws protect one well against plagiarism. So, sharing unpublished materials, with due caution
of course, should be encouraged.

I have one last recommendation for Apache and other Athabaskan textbook
developers: use pedagogical
materials for Navajo as models, after securing the proper permissions. Navajo is not so close to Apache that you won't
have any work left, but it is a lot easier to develop materials departing from Navajo textbooks than it is when you
depart from English, Spanish, French, or even Cherokee textbooks. We loosely based our textbook on Wilson (1995)
with his permission. Wilson and Vigil Martine (1996) based their Jicarilla Apache textbook on Wilson's textbooks
on Navajo (1969, 1978), so this a method that gets results.

Hale, Kenneth L. (1976). Theoretical linguistics in relation to
American Indian communities. In Wallace
Chafe (Ed.), American Indian languages and American
linguistics (pp. 35-50). Lisse: Peter de Ridder.